Rollers Pros and Cons

[plantknowsyourlocation]

I don't know for what purpose I made this in hindsight but I thought it'd be cool to go through the roller main weapons and see what separates them with pros/cons lists. This will not be looking at kits, even though a lot of the weapons in this class rely very heavily on their sub weapons (looking at you carbon and splat roller). For anyone not familiar with the class, this may be a good starting point when you're looking for which main weapon to focus, or to learn what you'll need to look out for when fighting any of these weapons. Keep in mind, I'm mostly a dynamo player with a carbon secondary, so if there's any incorrect or missing info here about any of the other rollers I'd love to hear it. Would not only benefit those reading the post, but also me, since I’m making an attempt to fully pick up all these weapons in time.

Carbon- The most pure melee weapon in the game. A silent assassin, and a win condition for any team willing to play around it.

Pros:

• Fastest kill time in the game with horizontal, tied for second fastest with vertical (technically the actual fastest is Reef-Lux but you aren’t hitting that)
• Fastest roller by far, lightweight
• Extremely fast, unreactable kills over ledges, and uniquely can even kill people behind short walls, both with vertical
• Vertical is an extremely dangerous and consistent kill tool
• Fastest roll and vertical means it can escape bad spots easier than other rollers
• By far the most mentally taxing sharking weapon to deal with, any spot on the floor with enemy ink could be a carbon-based landmine
• Speed plus kill time, with its stealthy playstyle, means it can easily run through an entire team before they realize there's a problem at all

Cons:

• Must shark, gets no value otherwise, lacks any versatility
• Relies on teammates to paint for it so it doesn't reveal itself, bound to team’s ink
• Can't paint well at all, and sharking playstyle means it rarely ever gets time to paint
• As a consequence of the above, awful special output
• High endlag like every roller, but the range it plays in means it tends to be a "hit the shot or die" kind of weapon, no room for error, especially because its main combat tool is vertical, which is somewhat precise
• Horizontal damage is painfully inconsistent and goes as low as 25 damage, feels like hitting the opponent with a pool noodle if you aren't hitting them point-blank
• Tiny, weak horizontal also means that this weapon can't use its horizontal for any form of aoe or falloff shots

Splat Roller- Balanced melee sharking and aoe hybrid weapon, basically heavy carbon.

Pros:

• Solid enough range on the one-shots and pretty reliable
• Very high kill range over ledges with verticals, quite scary
• Scary above ledges and behind walls too, with its falloff on horizontal
• Unlike carbon, also has the ability to use horizontal to apply chip across a decently wide area
• Vertical is a decent enough poke and its horizontal has decent aoe and poking range, can sometimes just provide little bits of chip pretty safely
• Good sharker, and has higher threat range than carbon once it decides to stop sharking, which is nice since both are bound to their teammates' ink

Cons:

• Oddly slow kill time for its effective range, less than half as fast as carbon on both flicks, and slower to kill than even midlines like Splattershot Pro, and though it makes sense with its aoe and one-shot attributes, it means the weapon definitely struggles to win fights without getting the drop on someone or abusing some terrain
• Paint isn't as bad as carbon's, but it's not very good, nor is it consistent on horizontals
• Also bad special output, not as bad but you get the gist
• Like carbon, can't paint for itselfs, so it's bound to its teammates' ink and is reliant on them to set it up where it wants to be
• On its own, everything outside its 1-shot range is really not very threatening at all, needs teammates to followup on the damage since its flicks are too slow to do it on its own
• While not as bad or as important as it is on dynamo, horizontal has some hitbox consistency problems

Dynamo- Slow, vulnerable, defensive. Doesn't play much like other rollers, opting to play much more safely, and if set up it’s very hard to deal with.

Pros:

• Massive aoe, covers a large area in a wave of unavoidable chip damage, or sometimes even gets aoe collateral kills, very nice against clumped enemies and can turn the tide of a fight for your teammates
• Relatively high one-shot and chip range, combined with its paint, makes it very hard to approach after it starts a flick
• Dangerous above and below ledges on account of very dangerous falloff damage
• Decent paint with horizontals, albeit inconsistent with its weird spread
• Verticals have very high range and combo well with other weapons targeting the same player, allows the weapon to sometimes play more like an anchor temporarily
• When set up properly in a strong spot, it’s extremely hard to move for most weapons without specials or a very good bomb

Cons:

• Incredibly vulnerable every time it flicks, can't take back any choice, and so it dies incredibly easily to bombs, specials, or just getting its feet painted
• Gets stuck in ink worse than any other weapon in the game, fastest option to paint its feet is frame 45, rolling doesn't immediately paint beneath it and is so slow that it takes a while for dynamo to even reach the ink its putting down with the roll, often your fastest option is to just try walking out of the ink
• Because of how much it gets stuck in ink, poked by bombs and specials, etc, it spends a lot of the game damaged and sometimes dies to less hits than other weapons
• No range where it particularly excels, loses to short range weapons if it isn't preemptively flicking before they can get in range (even then many outrange its 1-shot), loses to midlines and backlines in almost every encounter due to its pathetically low dps at longer ranges and incredible amount of vulnerability if it tries to challenge, because of all this it's forced to almost exclusively play behind terrain or with a teammate
• So slow to output chip that players can heal between flicks at times
• Sometimes a 3 shot, which while basically universal for rollers, is incredibly sad for how slow it is, and while it’s justified on horizontal due to its aoe, it reduces the actual threat range of the vertical by a lot on a tool meant to be for single target ranged damage
• Really struggles to move forward on its own, not due to a lack of paint, but a lack of speed and ability to initiate engagements, and it needs teammates to take ground for it to set up in specific locations it can hold down
• Really awful ink efficiency and white ink frames, giving it low up time and high down time
• Horizontal has extremely glaring hitbox and paint consistency issues, leading to its main strengths sometimes not mattering due to bad rng
• Even horizontal's max range is sometimes inconsistent
• Vertical can't be used to spam hitboxes over ledges, making it not as lethally scary under a ledge as some of the other rollers, even if horizontal is still a strong ledge camping tool

Flingza- A weird hybrid between a very long-ranged paint support, and classic roller sharking.

Pros:

• Vertical paint is insane, and can paint from a very long range
• Gets specials very fast and with very little commitment
• Unlike other sharking rollers, has more flexibility for when you don't see opportunities for shark for kills, and during that time can be assisting from farther back, to help its team get the map control it needs to switch to playing like a more standard roller
• Chip on vertical is very long-ranged and the flick comes out slightly faster than dynamo's horizontal
• Vertical is still somewhat vulnerable, but significantly less so than dynamo's, since it has a much faster strafe speed, and just being faster to end
• Horizontal is very slightly faster than splat roller's with the exact same lethal range

Cons:

• Vertical damage scaling is terrible, reaching minimum damage much earlier in its flick's range than any other roller, meaning it's almost always a three shot at a range, or dealing very minor chip that's very hard to combo off of
• Vertical kill range is also very unimpressive for the long windup
• By far the worst roller in the game at abusing terrain, its horizontal falloff is spread in a T-shape, where closer than max range it only has a hitbox in the center of the flick, and its vertical can't hit up over ledges the same way as a lot of the other rollers
• Horizontal flick has the potential to be as weak as a 4 shot, like carbon
• Horizontal paint is utter garbage, and while that doesn't matter as much considering vertical, it does suck when you want a wide patch of the floor painted right in front of you, and means flingza still struggles to paint for itself when it wants to play aggressively, since vertical is too slow a tool in those moments

Big Swig- And you thought flingza was the painting roller.

Pros:

• Literally the best paint in the entire game, making it excellent for enabling its team to move, and since it's burst paint, it's near impossible to win paint wars against it in zones
• Can use its paint for itself very well, since its horizontal is very fast and provides a very consistent and wide area of paint, and vertical is also very fast with a very long paint trail, making it a very strong mobility tool
• Gets instant specials
• Chip is somewhat decent, being able to quickly apply 35 damage across a very wide and very far area with its horizontal, and its vertical being very fast for its range meaning it can constantly pelt ranged opponents with 40 damage hits
• Horizontal is a very strong combo tool with the vertical, any hit within 65 damage on vertical is easy to turn into a kill
• Can hit over ledges very quickly and at a surprisingly long range with verticals, maybe the most dangerous roller in these spots
• Uniquely, while the other rollers all suck at dealing with objects, swig has ridiculously high object damage

Cons:

• Damage is really low on horizontals, hard to do much with it in combat unless the opponent is already damaged, and even then it's inconsistent, and tends to 3-shot even on people running at you, making this weapon very easy to rush
• Verticals are uniquely thin and hard to hit, and still relatively slow and short-ranged compared to most weapons' killing tools, requiring high precision to even have a chance of beating better fighting weapons
• Aoe isn't very threatening on its own, horizontals don't do enough damage to make it as scary as any other aoe weapon, and it has really bad falloff
• Okay if you can keep people at a range, but really struggles when getting rushed down, and it can't hold space very well at all against something mobile trying to run at it, since there's no threat of a horizontal 1-shot, or even the threat of a 2-shot at times
• Lower ink efficiency than all the other rollers aside from dynamo, and it's the one flicking most often to maintain paint or to 2-shot for kills, though this weakness is partially mitigated by its very quick access to specials

Do with this info as you will, I don't know.